"A great film by Paul Schrader, best known for having penned a bunch of legendary screenplays for Martin Scorsese. The film revolves around Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, and jumps between the story of his life and dreamlike depictions of scenes from his books. It’s got a particularly good score by Philip Glass, who I usually find to be tedious, but this one is nice. Schrader’s use of color and set design during the book segments of the film are quite theatrical and feel closely related to Robert Wilson’s on Einstein on the Beach—although I don’t have any evidence to back that connection up. Great flick, though."

"Cronenberg is a good example of a director who has often made my favorite kind of film: a genre movie that feels profound. I haven’t seen The Brood in a long time, but I remember how it excited me. He wrote it too, as he will, and it’s low budget, which is a virtue, and it’s a horror movie that ingeniously presents the idea of extreme human emotion becoming personified, in a strong metaphor for how life can feel. Maybe that’s already a spoiler. I’ll stop, except to say that perhaps an even greater instance of a profound genre flick from Cronenberg is The Fly."